Anand Thakore is a Hindustani Classical Singer by profession, a disciple of Pandit Satyasheel Deshpande and Pandit Baban Haldankar. He has been writing poetry in English since his teens. 'Waking in December' ( Harbour Line, 2001, ISBN 81-902981-0-0) is his first collection of poems. He lives in Mumbai where he teaches and performs Hindustani vocal music.. He is currently working on his second book of verse.

Vacillations Of A Recondite Nudist

Swaddled in white quilts and buttoned up tight –
No lover asks me why this must be so –
I will not sleep in the nude tonight.

They outleap themselves who leap into sight.
Can the arrow but fear the tightening bow?
Swaddled in white quilts and buttoned up tight.

Bright mirrors urge me to stay away from light -
What if there is no-one here to know? -
I will not sleep in the nude tonight.

Do the naked ascend undaunted by height?
Is it only by casting off we grow?
Swaddled in white quilts and buttoned up tight..

Must the string be left to the will of the kite?
The question appeals but the answer is no,
I will not sleep in the nude tonight;

Though swans wear nothing when they break into flight –
For who can endure the slow letting-go? -
Swaddled in white quilts and buttoned up tight.
I will not sleep in the nude tonight.

Link to MP3s

Poem 1
Poem 2
Poem 3
Poem 4
Poem 5
Poem 6

Nocturne

Dusk and the ghats were behind us when we reached the river.
Summer had drained it of all motion, but its grey
Surfaces were still cold and clear. I watched you shiver
As we undressed. We swam, and between the algae
The moon swam with us like a silver
Fish, then sank into the silt like a broken plate
As your fingers ruffled the summer-still river.
Reflection made it more distant, and we had no bait
With which to catch the quick inflections of its light -
Only the taut insistence of memory.
How long it seemed till the water resettled, and sight
Pieced together again that cracked porcelain moon. We
Swam, bare as ourselves and the river we swam in,
Then deep in the shallows dead still we lay.
You will remember this now though you were looking away:
Us wading ashore through the river's wet skin,
And clouds roll below us like shoals of grey salmon.

Chandri Villa

His name was Chandri - my grandfather once said -
Who was to live here, but died of plague. Each of us fails
In the end, but I was born in a house built for the dead:
On the red gate they hammered his name with nails.

Nineteen Nineteen. These bougainvillaeas
Have grown since then; the dead leave us, leaving no trails;
Deep in the banyan-grove at Chandri Villa,
A secret sense of loss prevails.

And the very stillness of these trees carries me past an April
Long dead, newly strewn with banyan-leaves; thick roots dangle
Above my head - ancient, knotted roots I cannot untangle,
Till I am a child once again though against my will,

The wide grove closing its arms as if to kill.
My veins so many banyan-roots twisted into one,
And all their tangled knots come undone,
Till almost I see him, the plagued man I never will.

Creepers On A  Steel Door

Three months now, creeping up this door,
Half-open, between myself and the garden-yard;
I wonder, why at times, it is so hard
To reach the wide world across the narrow floor.

Space must have its bounds, I suppose;
Though the heart's first impulse be to leap.
The creeper does not wish to move, it simply grows -
It is the eye that makes these broad leaves creep.

But see how tight each tendril grips the grill,
Where the highest leaves, transluscence-shy, peep inside.
I can tell what makes them want to hide -
Could they hear, I would tell them: looking in can kill.

To Roethke

I found you at the corner of a dark shelf,
Taking a cadence from Yeats and about
To give it back again; in darkest doubt
You sang the slow glide and descent of the self,

Yourself too alive in things around;
The heron's swift dive, a quivering minnow,
The high, impulsive flight of the wren- and though
I knew you for one rooted to the ground,

Your dark music carried me where-
Not asking why and beyond all reason -
Time lent my eyes their darkest season
To see what otherwise they would not dare;

I heard myself in each darkening tone,
Your voice my way of moving on,
I moved in a motion not my own ;
My bones flutes children played upon.

Tidal Wave

Believe me,
I didn't mean to do this.
I believed, with the seers and ecstatics,
That the sea would bring me
Where I needed to arrive,
That no amount of lunging shorewards or holding back,
Could alter anything about to happen.
I began as a tremor,
A shudder in the brooding loins of the sea,
That set me moving to no visible end;
Her sway seemed to hold all motion in place
And I dreamed of nothing that breathed beyond her skin,
Was granted no visions,
As she urged me on -
Spurring me out of her yet tightening her grip -
Of the fields I would swamp, the children I would drown,
The homes I would crush with soft claws of water;
Nor could I tell  -
As those doomed coasts drew near  -
That in their ruin lay also my own:
Or the end , at least,
Of the only chance I thought I had
Of being truly born;
Of being anything more than an aspect of  sea.
Unspawned, I remain now as ghosts remain,
A voice in the veins of those who survived me
That clings to a theme they long to forget;
Yet hear me now,
Women of the coast, offspring of the dead,
You whose progeny I snatched from your arms,
Whose crops I wrecked and whose cattle I killed,
Hear me and see how softly I  speak:
No roar. No crash.
No surging crescendo, no deafening cascade,
No rapt interjections of spindrift and surf;
And no more of that turgid, moon-depraved magniloquence
That brought me briefly to believe myself
A being apart from the sea that bore me.
Friends of the departed, lovers of the drowned,
Hear me when I say I had no will in this matter.
Hear me, and forgive.